A collection of thoughts
and photos of my life and
work in the northern
Great Plains of
North America
(and occasionally other
places in the world).

Saturday, January 23, 2010

Margret Atwood on Birds

This morning I found a wonderful essay about birds by Margret Atwood from The Guardian. Below are some excerpts but you really should read the whole thing.

"A bird of the air shall carry the voice," says Ecclesiastes, with impressive gravitas, "and those that have wings shall tell the truth"; and we can bet that those bird-borne truths were momentous....

Back in the 70s and 80s and then the 90s, however, you could depend on the birds to be more or less where they were supposed to be, more or less when they were supposed to be there. Failures to see them were bad luck or lack of skill on your part: the birds themselves were surely just around the corner. If not this time, then next; if not this year, then next. But all that is changing, and it's changing very rapidly. The suddenness of the decline – not only in threatened species, but in relatively abundant ones, such as the neotropical woodland warblers – is very worrying. No bird species can any longer be taken for granted....

"Canary in the coal mine" – which comes from a time when miners knew that if their caged canaries toppled over it meant imminent asphyxiation for them – is not an empty phrase: where birds are dying now (through poisons, habitat destruction, and famine), people will die later. The die-off in seabirds, for instance, signals a die-off in sea life, including fish. It doesn't take a very smart augur to read that kind of bird omen....

Still, "'Hope' is the thing with feathers," wrote Emily Dickinson. Too often, these days, it isn't. But in the case of the albatross, it is, if we're reading the bird signals right. Or at least it could be; which is the nature of hope.